Edith Hall > Quotes

“Aristotle was convinced that most people get most of their pleasure from learning things and wondering about and at the world.”
― Edith Hall, Aristotle's Way: How Ancient Wisdom Can Change Your Life

“John F. Kennedy summed up Aristotelian happiness in a single sentence: “The full use of your powers along lines of excellence in a life affording scope.”
― Edith Hall, Aristotle's Way: How Ancient Wisdom Can Change Your Life

“irony can often mask contempt”
― Edith Hall, Aristotle's Way: How Ancient Wisdom Can Change Your Life

“According to him, the ultimate goal of human life is, simply, happiness, which means finding a purpose in order to realize your potential and working on your behavior to become the best version of yourself. You are your own moral agent, but act in an interconnected world where partnerships with other people are of great significance.”
― Edith Hall, Aristotle's Way: How Ancient Wisdom Can Change Your Life

“Aristotle provides everything you need to avoid the realization of the dying protagonist of Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886), that he has wasted much of his life scaling the social ladder, and putting self-interest above compassion and community values, all the while married to a woman he dislikes. Facing his imminent death, he hates his closest family members, who won’t even talk to him about it.”
― Edith Hall, Aristotle's Way: How Ancient Wisdom Can Change Your Life

“Aristotle argued that happiness is not compatible with self-loathing. People who cannot respect themselves and believe in their own fundamental decency cannot even like themselves, let alone other people.”
― Edith Hall, Aristotle's Way: How Ancient Wisdom Can Change Your Life

“things which are of common interest”
― Edith Hall, Aristotle's Way: How Ancient Wisdom Can Change Your Life

“Aristotle quotes with approval a poet named Agathon, who wrote, “The only thing denied even to God is the power to undo what has been done.”
― Edith Hall, Aristotle's Way: How Ancient Wisdom Can Change Your Life

“nature, rather than a concept beyond nature—such as god or gods—is the fundamental basis of our analysis of our affairs and our decisions. This was the single most important difference between Aristotle and his teacher, Plato, who believed that humans needed to find answers to the problems of existence in an invisible world of intangible ideas”
― Edith Hall, Aristotle's Way: How Ancient Wisdom Can Change Your Life

“Happiness, in the Aristotelian sense, means deciding what you want to do, and why, and then implementing a plan to achieve it.”
― Edith Hall, Aristotle's Way: How Ancient Wisdom Can Change Your Life

“inequality in property as the universal cause of civil strife.”
― Edith Hall, Aristotle's Way: How Ancient Wisdom Can Change Your Life

“desiring revenge is likely to be virtuous and thus conducive to your happiness only if a wrong has been committed which can be righted by revenge. Righting the wrong should help protect in the future from a similar wrong, at the hands of the same perpetrator.”
― Edith Hall, Aristotle's Way: How Ancient Wisdom Can Change Your Life

“education at all levels, from small children through to young adults, is of such fundamental importance to the flourishing of the community under any form of constitution that it must be publicly determined and can’t possibly be left to be decided ad hoc by each parent.”
― Edith Hall, Aristotle's Way: How Ancient Wisdom Can Change Your Life

“Aristotle devotes many pages to the relationship between your internal self as a moral agent – your ability to determine your own behaviour and control your destiny”
― Edith Hall, Aristotle’s Way: How Ancient Wisdom Can Change Your Life

“The method entails deliberating competently about all alternative courses of action which may or may not conduce to achieving your goals, attempting to anticipate the consequences of each course of action, and then choosing and sticking to one.”
― Edith Hall, Aristotle’s Way: How Ancient Wisdom Can Change Your Life

“Politicians are scrutinized for what they have done wrong, but rarely for what they have not done to improve the situation of the people they are”
― Edith Hall, Aristotle's Way: How Ancient Wisdom Can Change Your Life

“irascible.”
― Edith Hall, Aristotle's Way: How Ancient Wisdom Can Change Your Life

“Like his teacher Plato, and Plato’s teacher Socrates before him, Aristotle liked to walk as he reflected; so have many important philosophers since, including Nietzsche, who insisted that “only ideas gained through walking have any worth at all.”
― Edith Hall, Aristotle's Way: How Ancient Wisdom Can Change Your Life

“Aristotle shows remarkable psychological acuity in seeing that people who need to criticize others constantly have a problem with respecting themselves.”
― Edith Hall, Aristotle's Way: How Ancient Wisdom Can Change Your Life

“unnecessary self-denial has no place in his philosophy of respect toward self and others.”
― Edith Hall, Aristotle's Way: How Ancient Wisdom Can Change Your Life

“invaluable close relationships require frequent contact.”
― Edith Hall, Aristotle's Way: How Ancient Wisdom Can Change Your Life

“The second group consists of people of action who spend their lives in the public or political sphere. Their goal is fame or honor—recognition. The problem, however, is that they are keener on being recognized, than on actually being good people. What matters is the accolades and not the reason for”
― Edith Hall, Aristotle's Way: How Ancient Wisdom Can Change Your Life

“Aristotle believed that if you train yourself to be good, by working on your virtues and controlling your vices, you will discover that a happy state of mind comes from habitually doing the right thing.”
― Edith Hall, Aristotle's Way: How Ancient Wisdom Can Change Your Life

“Aristotle himself was an enthusiastic walker, who valued bodily health and pleasure highly. He certainly would have encouraged pastimes which involved exercise, creative pursuits, music and the enjoyment of fine food and drink.”
― Edith Hall, Aristotle's Way: How Ancient Wisdom Can Change Your Life

“There is therefore nothing more important than finding out what each individual is potentially good at.”
― Edith Hall, Aristotle's Way: How Ancient Wisdom Can Change Your Life

“sufficient basic resources not to be forced to be selfish in order to survive, enjoy being benevolent and socially interconnected. They feel good when they help other people. Living cooperatively in association with other people, in families and communities, seems to be the natural desire and state of the human being. The hallmarks of an Aristotelian thinker are living in these social groups, thinking rationally, making moral choices, using wholesome pleasure as a guide to what is good, and fostering happiness in self and others.”
― Edith Hall, Aristotle's Way: How Ancient Wisdom Can Change Your Life

“Odysseus is one of antiquity’s few exclusively heterosexual heroes.”
― Edith Hall, Introducing the Ancient Greeks: From Bronze Age Seafarers to Navigators of the Western Mind

“he dislikes “a boy who sleeps around.”
― Edith Hall, Introducing the Ancient Greeks: From Bronze Age Seafarers to Navigators of the Western Mind

“The Open Society of Athens In democratic Athens of the fifth and fourth centuries BC, Greek civilization reached the apex of creativity. Perhaps alone among the Greek communities studied in this book, the classical Athenians demonstrated their ample endowment with every one of the ten characteristics that defined the ancient Greek mind-set. They were superb sailors, insatiably curious, and unusually suspicious of individuals with any kind of power. They were deeply competitive, masters of the spoken word, enjoyed laughing so much that they institutionalized comic theater, and were addicted to pleasurable pastimes. Yet the feature of the Athenian character that underlies every aspect of their collective achievement is undoubtedly their openness—to innovation, to adopting ideas from outside, and to self-expression.”
― Edith Hall, Introducing the Ancient Greeks: From Bronze Age Seafarers to Navigators of the Western Mind

“The Babylonians had known about Pythagoras’s theorem centuries before Pythagoras was born. The”
― Edith Hall, Introducing the Ancient Greeks: From Bronze Age Seafarers to Navigators of the Western Mind